This article originally appeared in the May 2015 issue of Architectural Digest.

For centuries Lisbon, Portugal, has been a crucial trading port and pit stop for sailors on their way to the Mediterranean Sea. As a consequence, local bloodlines are spiked with the DNA of Vikings and other Northern European adventurers who journeyed south. In the case of interior decorator Pedro Espírito Santo, his wayfaring ancestor was a kilt-wearing Scot named Munro who, when offered a choice between joining the army or becoming a clergyman—a common fate for younger sons in centuries past—made a dash for Portugal and begot a dynasty of traders.

“This must be a remnant of my heritage,” Espírito Santo says with a wink as he prepares afternoon tea in the kitchen of his Lisbon home, standing at a 19th-century sideboard laden with tea canisters. Though utilitarian in purpose, the white-walled room is as exuberantly furnished as the rest of the expansive apartment—and likewise filled with numerous souvenirs of Espírito Santo’s eventful life. Next to the sideboard hangs a landscape he picked up in Brazil, where he has owned a large horse farm for decades. A vivid-blue cabinet hosts a statue of Saint Francis of Assisi, its neck and arms thickly hung with amulets, beads, and feathery talismans that bring to mind tribal ornaments worn in Mozambique, where a youthful Espírito Santo, at the time an heir to Portugal’s leading financial fortune, served as a soldier. One kitchen wall gleams with 18th-century tiles that are a daily reminder of those gracing his family’s fabled estate, Casa de Santa Maria, now a museum, in the nearby town of Cascais.

Pedro’s mother, Isabel—great-great-granddaughter of that farsighted Scot, wife of a chairman of Banco Espírito Santo, and mother of 11 children—recognized early on her youngest son’s fine eye for art and objects. When he was in his early teens, she allowed him to redecorate the family’s living room. Several years later he was working with Gerald Van der Kemp, chief curator at Versailles (where Madame du Barry’s exquisite leather-bound books were conserved by the Ricardo do Espírito Santo Silva Foundation, a distinguished decorative-arts-preservation institute that was established by one of Pedro’s uncles). The handsome young aesthete was in his element at the French palace, watching in wonder as his mentor stripped away 19th-century red velvet wall coverings in order to revive the delicate ancien régime boiserie underneath. “One century destroys another,” Espírito Santo says, noting that it is a style lesson he has never forgotten.

He expected to be at Van der Kemp’s side for the foreseeable future, but that heady association ended prematurely: In the mid-1960s, shortly after Espírito Santo started the job, he was drafted and sent to Mozambique, which was fighting for its independence from Portugal. (Though he never saw combat, he did outfit the army’s headquarters.) A couple of years later he was back in Lisbon, studying architecture, but gave that up to become a decorator to the Portuguese elite.

In decorator Pedro Espírito Santo’s frescoed Lisbon, Portugal, salon, an 1860s Orientalist painting is flanked by foil bouquets. The gilt-wood fauteuil is antique, the cocktail table is Asian, and the needlepoint carpet was custom made.

“It was my bourgeoisie period,” the designer explains, laughing. A 16-year sojourn in Brazil came next, impelled by Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution. Despite those disruptive relocations, Espírito Santo’s singular genius remains undimmed. Says Marta Amaral, a feng shui consultant on his projects, among them the Pestana Palace hotel in Lisbon, “Pedro can adapt to any situation with ease, and his work reflects that.” In his skillful hands, russet stripes make merry with red-and-white zigzags, mismatched blue checks, and splashes of chinoiserie—and that’s just in the living room of his apartment, which takes up the piano nobile of an 18th-century townhouse in the quaint Bairro da Sé district.

“I was not looking for a flat, but this one found me,” says the designer. “No one else would have wanted 11 rooms with no proper bedroom and only a tiny bath.” Reached by climbing a marble staircase, the home may have lacked certain amenities but it was rich in character, the enfilade of reception rooms embellished with intricate frescoes of floral garlands and Vitruvian scrolls in palest pink. Modern comforts were swiftly installed. An English cast-iron tub now takes up a corner of a chamber swagged with ravishing trompe l’oeil draperies, while a shower has been slotted into a narrow service corridor.

As for bedrooms, Espírito Santo did fashion one for himself. That being said, slumber-ready upholstered furnishings of every size and description—daybeds, méridiennes, sofas—are scattered all over the place, creating a multiplicity of locations to catch 40 winks. “I can choose which room I want to sleep in every night,” he jokes. But guests needn’t fret. When close friends, such as Valentino brand ambassador Carlos Souza or the actress and model Marisa Berenson, come to visit, the designer closes off three connecting salons to form a cozy suite.

Given Espírito Santo’s reputation as a consummate host, the heart of the dwelling is the dining room. After he ripped down a wall covering that he condemned as “horrid red velvet brocade” (shades of Monsieur Van der Kemp), artisans armed with toothbrushes and fine steel wool spent two years reviving the space’s painted columns and flowering urns. It is here that Espírito Santo now presides over convivial dinners that are the talk of the town (as well as a feast for the eyes), his guests seated around a stately mahogany pedestal table in a motley mix of Victorian side chairs and Louis XVI–style bergères. Hefty heirloom silverware and vintage linen napkins that measure more than three feet square hark back to a more ceremonial age, as does the flattering glow of candles the designer prefers to the glare of electricity. Souza admiringly recalls a table set with Chinese plates and vases of different types—famille rose, café au lait, blue with white—that bear witness to the Espírito Santo clan’s decades of collecting. Stunned by the dining room’s romantic atmosphere, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg once declared, “Oh, Pedro, it’s so divine it’s almost Russian.”

Dinner guests typically relax in the kitchen while Espírito Santo cooks vegetarian, often macrobiotic, fare, though occasionally fish en papillote makes an appearance. Ice-cold Dão white wine is glugged into glasses all around. When it’s time to eat, the designer troops everyone through the flat in a 360-degree circuit that culminates in the dining room and takes in everything he loves: The living room’s sinuous tête-à-tête. The salon, where glittering gold-foil bouquets meet a vigorously button-tufted Victorian sofa. An antechamber wrapped with a bamboo wall covering and skirted with azulejos. Then there is a sunny little sitting room where charming old Scottish landscapes flank a large 1890s painting depicting a Native American kneeling at the edge of a cliff. Part Wunderkammer, part petit palais, and all autobiography, Espírito Santo’s bohemian private world is a perfect reflection of one man’s colorful, endlessly adaptive life.

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